Over 50 years, Pulitzer Prize winner Eudora Welty and New Yorker editor William Maxwell penned warm and intelligent letters to each other, sharing worries about work and family, literary opinions and scuttlebutt, moments of despair and hilarity. We see both their editorial relationship and their kindred spirits reflected in these letters, assembled by Suzanne Marrs, Welty's friend and biographer. We also get a rare glimpse into their literary world; colleagues like James Thurber, William Shawn, Katherine Anne Porter, J.D. Salinger, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, John Updike, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Ford Madox Ford, and John Cheever appear throughout, and the book offers a gold mine of reading recommendations.

"While Welty and her New Yorker editor Maxwell were contemporaries, he 34, she 33 when they first met at a New York literary party in 1942, they seemed to be virtual opposites. He was a devoted family man; she was a loner. His nearly 200 letters to her divulged his entire personality; among the surviving letters, Welty omitted any reference to the love of her life, married crime novelist Ross Macdonald. But Welty and Maxwell recognized from the get-go that they were kindred spirits. The correspondence of this volume, gracefully edited and annotated by Welty's biographer Marrs, takes off in 1951, when The New Yorker began to publish Welty's fiction. Maxwell was an accomplished writer, too, and in these unfailingly cozy letters, which take us up to the 1990s into his old age, the pair discuss not only their work together and apart, but the orchids they loved, their day-to-day lives, and the writers they admired, from Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas to J.D. Salinger. Both correspondents were blessed with personality-plus, mirrored in these letters. Also included are one essay, one speech, and one reader's report by Maxwell."—Publishers Weekly